Broken
by Distorted Pheonix
Summary: I saw Death come for me, welcomed him, embraced him - and watched him pass me by...


I was broken that day.

I mean, really broken, the way that you know you won't ever be fixed. Shattered, really.

It was to be expected. I saw Death come for me, welcomed him, embraced him - and watched him pass me by for the one person that still meant anything to me. I watched him come and I couldn't do anything about it.

Maybe it was the way he looked me right in the eyes just before he died, the desperate gasp wrenched from the cracked and bleeding lips. Maybe it was the fact that I'd already lost my last best friend in the world only five minutes before, and now it was my godson who embraced Thanatos instead of me, as it should have been. Maybe it was the way I couldn't do anything to stop it, not even cry, because I had nothing, nothing at all left, not even tears.

Oh, God.

And then he walked by, with those cruel, crimson eyes and that cold, calculating smile, and he did the most heartless thing imaginable - he left me alive.

So I lay on the floor, bathed in my best friend's blood, haunted by my godson's staring eyes, shivering, disbelieving. The tears finally came, and it was like a dam had opened up and all the world's despair poured down my face. I just couldn't, just _wouldn't_ stop. It was a hysterical reaction, but even now, I'm still crying. To stop would mean to accept the fact that I am all alone.

I am dead now. My heart is beating and my blood is flowing, but I have no will to truly live, not without the only family I ever had. It's like that Christmas all over again, the one where Beck and the boys burned to death in the den. It's like Halloween, when James and Lily died, and Peter died and was reborn as Wormtail. 

You see, I've always connected to Harry, really known how he was feeling. I'd never met my parents either, you see, so there was no 'I always hated how my mother did this' and then there'd be that awkward silence before the apology, which he accepted as if that sort of thing happened every day. Which it did, I suppose. But there was none of that with us. We both understood what it was to have your friends as your only family. We both knew the protectiveness that came with that, and the deeper than average affection. We understood each other.

But in the end, I'd failed him. Worse, I'd failed myself, I'd let my weaknesses overpower my desire to protect, the dog's instinct that had been with me even before my Animagus form. I'd failed him, and Remus, and myself, and Peter, and Lily and James and Dumbledore and Beck and Sheri. I'd failed the Longbottoms and the Bones and the Aufers and so many others as an Auror. And now I was alone.

People have said I am a strong man. They say I must be, to have survived all those years in Azkaban. They are wrong. I have always drawn my strength from my friends. So long as I had memories, company, someone to protect, I had strength. But I have nothing now. 

You see, after the fire took Sheri and Mama, I found Beck. Beck and the boys became my family, but they too perished in flames, right before Hogwarts. I was desperate those few months before learning of the wizarding world, but Remus and James and Lily and Peter, they became my family. Throughout school, the urge to protect never ceased. The dog was formed from my protective instincts. And even after we graduated, I stayed with Lily and James and later Harry, because they insisted.

I wouldn't have, had they not insisted, but I was glad they did. Peter had disappeared right after graduation, claiming a desire to travel the world, and Remus had become engaged to Arthur Weasley's younger sister, who just happened to be our age. I had no one to go home to, though I managed initially, procuring a flat of my own that I used mainly as a home base.

Lily had a habit of getting her way, though. It was just that she was always so _sensible_. As soon as she found out that I wasn't fixing dinner or breakfast because I was too tired to cook and I wasn't even attempting to mend myself after the nastier days on the job, she insisted I move in with them. I think she knew how I felt. She spent two summers with me, to James's and Remus's one, traveling around the world with stolen money, meeting with the natives, learning the culture, the entertainments, the despairs. She knew how I always purposely sought out the lower crust of humanity, the grooms at the racetracks in America, the peasants in the villages in Colombia, the mom and pop shops on the side of the rivers in France. She saw how I always slipped right into the culture but never really fit in, not like I wanted. She knew that what I did every summer was not acting the tourist, but searching for a place where I belonged.

I belong no where, I realize that now. I am, will always be, have always been a failure. I am the guardian that fails to protect what they love each time danger has threatened. That is what I have dedicated my life to, and I have failed.

I am broken now. I will never be fixed. I will always see the desperate look in Harry's eyes, always know the slick feel of werewolf blood between my fingers. I am lost and I can never be found.


End file.
